This afternoon I passed by a group of high school kids from China going down the street outside of Williams Hall, the office building in which I work. One of the girls said merrily, "Bur'ao", by which she meant Modern Standard Mandarin (MSM) bù zhīdào 不知道 ("[I] don't know").

The retroflex final -r is well known for northern varieties of Mandarin, but in Pekingese it seems that the mighty R has the ability to swallow up whole syllables, as in the example quoted in the previous paragraph.

Here are a couple more instances:

"O gao'r ni" for MSM wǒ gàosu nǐ 我告诉你 ("I tell you")

"Mbr'ao" for MSM wǒmen bù zhīdào 我们不知道 ("We don't know")

I suppose that we might call all of these allegro forms, i.e., changes in phrases induced by increased speed in speaking. Of course, not all such allegro forms involve R:

43 Comments

Lauren said,

I wonder whether some of these massive reductions in MSM become similar with [ai.jǝ.ǝ:] ("I don't know") plus its distinctive melody (possibly: L*+H L-H%) in MAE in that they are more recognizable from their frequency and environment/predictability than the remaining segments alone.

Ellen K. said,

Chad Nilep said,

One of the big hits in Japanese pop music during 2011 was a tune called "Oh my gā". My wife, a Japanese native who lived for more than a decade in the States declared this fact to be embarrassing, but I maintain that it's pretty typical — in spirit if not in detail — to the way many Americans speak. Apparently including presidents.

William Steed said,

This was presented at a plenary at ICPhS in Hong Kong (whose? I can't remember) as extreme phonetic reduction – "I do not know" as a sequence of three shwa syllables with the intonation pattern of "I don't know" intact.

Interestingly, the Google Translate speech synthesizer uses the rhotic Beijing pronunciation for Dashlar 大柵欄 (which it nonetheless transliterates as "Dà shānlán"), but not apparently for any other words.

Ellen K. said,

Carl, I can't tell if you are being sarcastic, or sincerely but wrongly thinking "n" for "I" is obvious. There's no N sound before the d in any version of "I don't know" that I've heard, and putting one in is adding a sound.

Also (general reply here) I think it's not accurate to take "I do not know" rather than "I don't know" as a starting point when talking about reduction of this phrase. "Don't", while etymologically a shortening of "do not", it's now an established morpheme.

Plane said,

As Chandra says, you can '[keep] the mouth entirely closed and [hum] the intonation.' This is also true if you open your mouth partway through the word, at various points. I'd guess that's the origin of the "n'dunno" transcription, but when I do this I never say the "d" sound, so it's more like "n'nno" or "n'unno" for me.

Then again, I'm more likely to say "iunno" than "dunno" if my mouth is open the whole time.

David Moser said,

These allegro forms (being a musician, I love this term, by the way!) can vary from mere voiced grunts to quick sketches of the actual phonemes. My 14-year-old daughter says "I don't know" in a way that can only be transcribed as something like "nnNNnuh" (just a slight improvement on Plane's "n'nno" or "n'unno"). The 'n' in "n'dunno" is meant to represent a nasal of some kind. You hear everything from "I dunno" to a consonant-less nasal suprasegmental glide "nNNnnn". "N'dunno" (or "M'dunno") is just in the middle of the spectrum somewhere.

Zhou Yunong sent in a long note in Chinese about one of her father's favorite expressions. I here paraphrase and summarize:

====

The way northerners speak is indeed different from the way we southerners speak. No matter whether southerners are speaking their topolect or Putonghua (Mandarin), seldom do they engage in slurring, elision, and retroflexion.

However, I recall my father's favorite expression, one which was habitually on his lips. Speaking in Suzhouese, he would often ask, "nǐ ā míngbái yìsi?" 你阿明白意思? [VHM: In Modern Standard Mandarin that would be "nǐ míngbái yìsi ma?" 你明白意思吗?] ("Do you understand what I mean?") Because he used this expression so much, he uttered it very quickly. From the time I was little, I remember that it sounded like this: "Ni a mang yi si?" with the "mingbai" in the middle coming out as "mang".

At first, when I was little, I didn't understand what he was asking when he would put this question to me. Later, when I grew up, I realized that he was pronouncing míngbái 明白 ("understand") as máng 忙 ("busy").

When my father spoke other sentences including the word míngbái 明白 ("understand"), he wouldn't pronounce it as máng 忙 ("busy"). It was only when he was using his favorite expression, "nǐ ā míngbái yìsi?" 你阿明白意思? ("Do you understand what I mean?") that he would pronounce "mingbai" as "mang", joining the two syllables as one.

un malpaso said,

I agree with @Mark F. in that the "n" in "n'dunno" stands for "ummmm…" It's also, after all, somewhat acceptable to just say "dunno" for "I don't know", the 1st person being implied.
Or, as it appears more often in my local southern/casual American slang, /auo/ with nasalization throughout, and the /u/ being realized as the half-open, unrounded "u" in "cup" with a slight touch of voiced labiodental approximant (since I am too lazy to copypaste the IPA). Or something like that. Never realized how hard it was to transcribe grunts :)

David B. said,

I do this with some phrases, though I've heard it's a symptom of my lazy midwestern speech background. For example I'll typically say something like "Muh putcha over'na chair" instead of "I'm going to put you over in the chair".

I know some people see that as a devolving sort of thing, but aren't things like that how languages eventually morph into new ones?

Zev Handel said,

Contractions are natural in the connected speech of speakers of all languages, and it is not uncommon for contractions that are commonly heard in speech to end up becoming the ordinary form even in careful, slow speech and, ultimately, writing language. In English, one can note the development of "God be with you" into "Good-bye" and then ultimately just "bye". Or note how in spoken language "they are" and "they were" are often nearly indistinguishable: is spoken "They're gonna go" a past-tense or present-tense formulation? (How do those English speakers understand each other?) Or note the common pronunciation "jeet" for "Did you eat?". One could go on and on.

What would be really surprising is if such allegro forms weren't found in Chinese!

My favorite example in English is still "sup" < "What's up?", which I heard in a bar full of sailors. They were all giving high-fives to each other and saying that. I had absolutely no idea what it meant. I knew that it must be something very common in their English (in fact, it was the most frequently uttered expression in that bar), but I felt so silly not being able to figure out what such a common expression meant. One after another, the sailors would walk by each other and say, usually very casually and perfunctorily, "sup". Finally I had to ask someone, and they looked at me as though I were daft. "Sup, man. Sup." It took me several tries before I found someone who was patient enough to explain to me that it meant "What's up?" Whereupon, I explained, "OMG! How can they understand each other?!" I might have come from another world, for I certainly didn't understand them.

Rodger C said,

I should note that the sailors I mentioned in the comment above usually didn't even give a rising intonation on "sup" to indicate that it was a question. More often the intonation was level or even downward trending.

Jason Cullen said,

@Victor Mair
Of course they had a a falling intonation in their question! Wh-Questions, or questions beginning with {who, what, when, where, why, how}, almost always have a falling intonation. Only Yes/No-Questions (those using either do-support [e.g. 'do you have a question?'] or tense-bearing auxiliary inversion [e.g. 'are you coming? would you even care?'] have rising intonation. The allegro form might have deleted the 'what' in 'what's up', but "sup" is still a form of Wh-Question.

Jason Cullen said,

@ Jerry Friedman 'How are you' is also a greeting (as it's long been noted that it is not, in fact, a request for information about the other party's health, emotional state, etc., since the most common answer is simply 'fine, you?'), and, as a Wh-Question, it has falling intonation.